The Missing Post

I'll clarify here that this post was started on the day it will post under, but not finished until today, August 13. I had been having such a hard time finding the words. The missing post title seems awfully fitting - miscarriage, missing the baby, missing the promise it brought. I hope this isn't too confusing to read as it spans a couple of weeks, but I thought it was too important not to ever post it.

I've been putting this off, but tonight (after 1:00 in the morning I might add) I feel like I have to purge some of this stuff that has been running through my head.

I lost my baby. It was a baby. It wasn't just a pregnancy, it wasn't a condition, it wasn't just a difference in my body, it was a baby. It was a baby that had a beating heart, a gender, and that was created out of love, conceived in this infertile body with no scientific help whatsoever. It was a miracle. And now it is gone. I have gone back and forth with feeling incredibly sad, feeling okay, feeling like the timing wasn't right, that it was better off this way. Then I remember that I actually voiced out loud in one of my depressed crying jags to Andy that maybe it would be better if I just lost the baby. I said the words. Do I think that caused my miscarriage? No. Do I feel incredibly bad that those words ever came out of my mouth? Absolutely. And of course now, I can't take them back. I can't take back the cavalier attitude I had towards this pregnancy. It wasn't always a blessing, it was a bit of a nuisance. I couldn't drink, I couldn't go in the hot tub, I was going to have to order extra fabric for a bridesmaid's dress I'll be wearing in September.

But it was a baby, my baby, and now I am back to almost feeling like it never happened. It doesn't feel real, memories of being scared, being happy, being smug, are fading. I have one ultrasound picture. I have 5 pee sticks in a drawer in my bathroom. I was pregnant, I did have a baby in there. I did have a belly, I did pull out maternity clothes. We told too many people, we didn't tell enough people because it mattered.

Part of me is just ticked that I've become another statistic. 1 in 6 couples deals with infertility, something like 1 in 3 pregnancies end in miscarriage. If you are the brave one to say it, you get responses from many women who will share with you their experiences. If you don't have a miscarriage? You might never know that your aunt, your sister, your friend from elementary school had one. Or many. You feel strange grieving something that you never saw, that wasn't around long enough to be identified by gender, named or having a face you could remember.

I am updating this post today (August 13), and I'm not sure if I want to post it just yet. Kind of fitting that it was exactly one month ago that we found out we lost the baby, and four weeks ago that I had the D&C. At the hospital, the nurses were very nice, very understanding, and sympathetic. Usually I just started in on the fact that I had 15 month old twins and they got on that topic instead. I had to fill out paperwork on how they would dispose of the fetal tissue. Again, this made me think - this was a baby. This was not just a medical mistake. Sure, if I was farther along, if the baby had formed more of its little body, we would have wanted to bury it properly. Instead, it got sent off to a lab for testing, and I don't exactly know what happens after that. Maybe I don't want to.

Andy and I spent a good deal of our anniversary talking about when life begins. When do you get a soul? When I read the message boards or blog posts of other Moms who lost babies, there is frequently talk of angel babies, seeing your baby again in Heaven and having your own guardian angel, or an angel for your babies that come before or after the one you lost. I was telling Andy how this really bugs me, because I don't know if I feel that way. I am not sure how I feel about the whole Heaven thing to begin with, mainly if it does exist, I am never quite sure where I fit in on the scale of people who get in :-) But I guess the main thing that bothers me is this - assuming this baby did have a soul, it did go to Heaven, and we'll meet up again someday - how in the world would I know it was my child? In Heaven, does it have a face? Would it look like Maggie, like Ben, like a little blob of cells? Having never seen the baby's face on Earth, how would I know what it would look like?

This led me to the flip side which was, if I didn't believe that you acquired a soul at conception, when in the world do you get one? I read the week by week pregnancy book, and I don't remember any mention of "and these week your baby grows fingernails, toenails, and a soul." There are many people who have tried to comfort me with the "you weren't very far along" speech (including, weirdly enough, my family doctor this week) saying that basically it was still just a blob of cells at this point. While part of me wants to think that, the bigger part of me doesn't want to think that way about a life we created.

So. How am I doing? Okay. Living. I love Ben and Maggie to death, I love being home with them, and we have been doing fun things this summer. I saw my doctor this week to check in on the depression meds. He asked if I was ready to wean off, and I told him about the whole I lost my job, I got pregnant, I lost the baby thing, and he agreed now is not the time. He in fact decided that with the other anxiety piece getting worse, that we should increase them. I can always wean off them later. I understand that at this point in my life, I shouldn't be deliriously happy. It is okay to be sad, to be upset, to be down. But I was sliding back into the not getting out of my pajamas, wanting to sleep all the time, and crying thing, so I am hoping this helps for now.

I find it ironic that this is my 100th post. I actually realized that when I was going to post it originally but never finished it. In other blogs I've seen the celebration of 100 posts, but that wasn't exactly the case here. If we want to be technical, I posted the 50 day post first, but this one was saved to be finished and should have been 100. Ironic.

This is my missing post.